in the military can be a bittersweet thing. Growing up I always enjoyed the holidays, especially Christmas. Whether it was seeing family, the great food, or the general spirit of Christmas, it was always something that I enjoyed. I learned pretty quickly when I got into the Army that not everyone had the same upbringing and formative years that I did so not everyone had the same experience that I did. But it was always just a little bit different on the holidays. For the most part you could just cruise through the deployment and take everything in stride and just keep going. But on holidays, at least to me, it was like something just wasn’t right. I’m fairly certain that I’ve said before that for the most part I tried to not think about being home because it made things more difficult, but in my experience that was next to impossible on days like Christmas.

I actually had two birthdays while I was deployed. My birthday is at the end of June and we were deployed from June 6, 2006 to September of 2007. In 2006 my birthday was in Kuwait and the highlight was a free camel ride while others who wanted the experience had to pay $5 or something like that. My 2007 birthday came and went as we were in the midst of one of the largest and deadliest offensives of the entire Iraq war so I didn’t give it much thought as it didn’t really matter to me at that point. Most of the other holidays I actually have a hard time recalling because they were no different than any other day for us. The one thing I do remember about them is that the chow hall always advertised a special meal, and I was always pissed off because we were never around to enjoy it as we spent most of our days living in the cities we were charged with overseeing. So for me, instead of ham and turkey with the other good stuff, I ate my usual can of Chef Boyardee Beeferoni and hot water.

There is one Christmas that sticks out as easily the most memorable holiday of my life, and that was 2006. We were in Baghdad at the time, and as we often did, we patrolled around the outskirts of Sadr City. On Christmas Day that year we were doing foot patrols around the area because it was raining so hard that the dirt streets were unable to accommodate our vehicles because of the mud. So we trudged through it on foot. It was not unlike any other day we’d had until we started to notice large crowds of people gathering in the streets and they didn’t appear to be very happy. We eventually found out why these people were gathering and becoming increasingly more aggressive towards us. Someone in another platoon, in a different neighborhood had ‘accidentally’ stepped on and killed a chicken and left without paying restitution to them. This set off a series of events that resulted in a riot involving thousands of angry Iraqi’s and probably 50-60 of us. We got a little bit nervous because a large crowd of angry people was a great situation to launch an impromptu ambush on us and it most likely wouldn’t have ended favorably for us had that happened. This was a very real possibility since there were several thousand well equipped and experienced militia fighters in Sadr City, only a block away. As it were, we decided the best course of action was to get the hell out of there and do it as quickly as possible and just let the situation die down without us being in the middle of it. As we walked and jogged several blocks back to our vehicles the crowds were following us despite the fact that we had nothing to do with the chicken incident. As we walked things started being thrown at us. It started with things that wouldn’t really hurt if they hit you but quickly escalated into bricks and glass bottles. Because of the terrible weather conditions it took us about two hours to get out of there, all the while being pelted with rocks and other debris, and we were just waiting for gunfire to erupt, but surprisingly, it never did.

This was certainly the most unforgettable Christmas of my life. It certainly wasn’t the most enjoyable, but I’m also very thankful that things didn’t progress into a deadly fight. In the end the only casualty was a chicken, which probably shouldn’t have died either. When I think about that it’s very easy to enjoy a nice quiet Christmas like I had this year, with good food and going to a late night movie.